[COMMENT:
A superb assessment of our current situation, one of the best such articles I
have read. And, heading right toward the correct answer -- return to the
sovereignty of God. Humanism is dying -- but not in fact leading
back to the Bible, but rather into neo-paganism.

Humanism, not the world, is
in its last days. But it will almost for sure be a violent death with most
of us caught in the carnage.
Or, it might just be a gentle sliding back into paganism -- with
Christians and Jews in the cross-hairs of the new rulers. But in the end, the
rebellious will die, and the faithful will win under the Lord Jesus Christ and
the Sword of the Spirit.

This article by R. J. Rushdoony has several marvelous
insights. Such as: the connection between humanist faith and its politics.
Anybody smell a rat? like crossing the forbidden line between their
religion and politics? Humanists have both a faith and a religion, and
like all government centralizers, they are highly politicized. But
only Jesus can be King of kings and Lord of lords.

The truth is that all religions have
a political
view. We Christians have been shamed into hiding ours. We will
be severely questioned by God on that issue. And had better change.

The death of an age is a bloody business. Men,
disillusioned with the promises of their faith, yet unwilling to surrender
them, strike out at everything in rage and in frustration. Like a rudderless
ship, the civilization loses its direction and is driven by events instead
of driving through them. Today, in the last days of humanism, as men
steadily destroy their world, it is important for us to understand the
meaning of the times and act in terms of that knowledge. The humanists in
their blindness celebrate "the death of God" when it is in fact the death of
humanism and their own funeral; they are racing to in their heedless course.

Humanism is dying because its faith is false, and
its promises bankrupt. Let us examine that faith in order to understand more
clearly its failure. First
of all, humanism presupposes a faith in man, even to insisting on the basic
goodness of man. This idealistic affirmation comes with it the assumption
that evil is not in man but rather in his environment. Change the
environment, and you thereby change man, it is held. As a result, humanistic
sociology and politics are rigorously environmental: every effort is made to
provide better housing, better education, every kind of environmental
control, but, in all of this, man's evil only seems to proliferate.

As a result, many humanists have themselves
abandoned their faith in man. Nietzsche, ahead of most, proclaimed the need
of superman to replace man, and evolutionists and socialists have dedicated
themselves to working towards the creation of a new man. Man as he now is,
in terms of this hope, is expendable: he is merely the ape who shall produce
the man of the future. Lenin who held this view, could therefore treat with
ruthless contempt the apes beneath him as he worked to bring the new man out
of them. In every version, this belief is a break with the humanistic faith
in man.

A second
basic concept of the humanistic faith is its affirmation that man is his own
god. As I have pointed out, in several of my books (e.g., This Independent Republic,
p. 140.), basic to every sound theology is the doctrine of the unity of the
godhead. A schizophrenic god is no god at all. Mankind, humanity, being made
up of gods, must be united to avoid a division in this new godhead, man.
This means world unity, a one-world order; it means world peace, for the
godhead must not be at war with itself.

Ironically, this faith has led to what has been
called "perpetual war for perpetual peace." To demand the unity of all men
is the essence of total imperialism. The result is total warfare. The peace
lovers are history's greatest warmongers. Worldwide interventionism to
effect world peace has characterized the policies of late of the U.S.S.R.,
the U.S., the U.N., and others. Granted their presuppositions, all are
"sincere", but sincerity does not mean either truth or justice.

Moreover, man without God ends up as man without
man, unable and unwilling to live at peace with anyone, and unable to live
at peace with himself. The existentialist Sartre has stated the modern mood
bluntly: "Hell is other people." If every man is his own god, knowing or
determining for himself what constitutes good and evil, then every man is at
war with any limitation upon himself imposed by other men or by a state.
Hell then is logically "other people", and the humanistic faith in man as
his own god becomes history's major impulse towards suicide. The Satanic
temptation (Genesis 3:5) thus becomes the counsel of death to men and
nations.

The third
basic doctrine of the religion of humanism is the belief in equality (see
again This Independent Republic,
p. 140). Equality is a concept of the age of humanism, with its respect for
the authority of science, transferred from the realm of mathematics and
applied to man. The results have been devastating. Two plus two equals four
is a valid concept, and a necessary abstraction. Such abstractions are
important tools. In dealing with board feet of lumber, all cut to size, and
graded, such abstractions work. But the richness and variety of man cannot
be expressed by abstractions. Two Africans and two Englishmen do not equal
four Americans, or vice versa: the equation mark now becomes an absurdity.
Who are these eight men, and what are their talents? Are they saints of God
or are they apostates, criminals or good citizens? One may be a plumber, and
the other a concert violinist; the plumber may be more important to you
today, and the violinist tonight. Each have their place, their function, and
the term equality is irrelevant to it: it imposes an abstract mathematical
judgment in an area where a vast variety of considerations must govern.

But we are governed today by the politics of
equality. To challenge the doctrine is in bad form, although everyone is
troubled, and society in an uproar, over the unrealistic attempts to enforce
an abstraction onto the concrete facts of life.

The doctrine is honored in principle and denied
in practice. The Marxist world affirms, "From each according to his
abilities, to each according to his needs", but this is not an equality of
work but of wealth. In practice, even this is abandoned by the Marxists in
favor of a variety of rewards and a radically unequal society, one with
greater variations of social status than the old Russia had. Both Fabian and
Marxist socialisms now favor Meritocracy, rigid examinations, state control
of all jobs, and positions being assigned (and power) in terms of
examinations. The result is the rise of a new privileged class. In Britain,
the House of Lords is steadily packed with Labor politicians, who have been
made peers, and there are signs that its power may be revived under the
leadership of this new elite. The equalitarians end up by asserting, as in
Orwell's Animal Farm,
that some animals are more "equal", than others! Whether it is the peasants
of Russia, or the Negroes of America, the most rebellious and angry people,
the most disillusioned members of equalitarian society, are those who have
been "made equal" by acts of state. They know that they have been defrauded,
and their impulse becomes revolutionary.

The fourth
basic concept of the religion of humanism is its belief in the inevitability
of progress. This is a secularized version of the belief in Providence.
Humanism, by denying God, has depersonalized history. The world and its
events are no longer the plan and handiwork of a personal, sovereign God;
they are the product of anonymous, impersonal social forces. These
impersonal forces, with planning man now guiding his own evolution, are
supposed to ensure, not only progress, but more rapid progress. The result
is, as Robert L. Heilbroner, in The
Future as History, has termed it, a "philosophy of
expectations." In terms of humanism, mankind should now be moving rapidly
into a paradise on earth. In the 1920s and 1930s, teachers and professors
often waxed lyrical in portraying the golden age which scientific planning
would usher in. Today, the most intelligent of humanism's children are most
in revolt against its failure to deliver on its promises. According to
Kenneth Keniston, in the November, 1969, Yale Alumni Magazine, the Students involved in
campus protests are usually the most intelligent on the campus. "One study
finds that the best way to predict whether a college will have anti-war
protests is to count the number of National Merit Scholars in the freshman
class... Furthermore, protesting students have been shown again and again to
be an elite within each college and university more privileged in
background, more academically successful, more socially concerned than their
less active classmates... It is partly for this reason that student unrest
concerns us profoundly. To be sure, if we consider white students (and I
will not discuss black militants here), only a minority of America's almost
7,000,000 college students are vocally disaffected. Yet if this minority is
selectively drawn from the future leaders of our society, does this fact not
threaten the continuity of our culture?" It does indeed, and the continuity
of humanistic culture is being destroyed by its own bitter and disillusioned
sons.

The destruction is also written into humanistic
culture at every turn. Because of this belief in the inevitability of
progress, men can believe that progress will come inevitably after
destruction. Destroy the past, clear the ground, and progress is inevitable.
This is basic to the revolutionary mentality. This scientism is described by
Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the
Masses, as a new form of barbarism. Such a barbarian
"believes that civilization is there in just the same way as the earth's
crust and the forest primeval." As a result, this barbarian destroys in
order to advance, because the destruction supposedly speeds up progress. The
more revolutionary humanism becomes, the more it is suicidal.

Fifth,
the basic saving institutions of humanism, i.e., its church or temple, are
state and school. Both today are morally bankrupt. The implicit anarchism in
all humanism makes man hostile to the state: it is always a hated
establishment to him, a restraint on his freedom to be his own god. Whatever
form the state takes, it displeases humanistic man. Very consistently, some
leaders on the new left now call for perpetual revolution as the only
answer.

The school is also bankrupt. The mathematical
dream of equality is especially absurd when applied to education, which is
the process of differentiation, analysis, and understanding, not a massive
leveling, of ideas and facts. Education is thus in growing chaos, and it
cannot improve on humanistic terms. Nothing is more ridiculous than a "save
our public schools" movement. In its origin, the public school movement was
socialistic and humanistic, and it cannot be otherwise. It is a state agency
for state purposes, and its basic premise is the state's right to control
and educate the child. The public school movement is bankrupt, and it is
dying.

Humanism is dying, if not dead. Living with a
corpse is no pleasant matter. It does not require documentation to tell us
that a corpse is far gone. The answer to our problem lies elsewhere, not in
documentation on death, but in reconstruction for life.

Humanism is dead, but the triune God lives and
rules, sovereign over all. There must be reconstruction, godly
reconstruction. Let the dead bury the dead. The living have work to do. All
things shall be made new; new schools, new social orders, new institutions,
renewed family life, in every area the principle of godly reconstruction
must be applied.

Defensive warfare is a mistake: it leaves the
initiative to the enemy. Those who are content to protect the past die with
it. Our calling is to offensive warfare to subdue the earth and to exercise
dominion over it (Gen. 1:26-28). This is what it means to be a man, created
in the image of God. Remember: dominion does not belong to a mouse.

Some years ago, J. Allen Smith, by no means a
conservative, wrote as follows in The
Growth and Decadence of Constitutional Government
(1939): "The basic conception of the old political order was not the divine
right of kings, but the sovereignty of God. The assumed divine right of the
temporal ruler was not an essential part of this doctrine. Divine
sovereignty, as envisaged in the Christian theory of the world, was simply a
conception of God as the ultimate source of authority. Direct human
intermediaries, such as pope or king, were purely adventitious features of
this belief." This belief in God's sovereignty meant also the rule of law.
As Smith continued, "Supreme unlimited power had no place in the political
thought of the early constitutionalists. All human authority was conceived
to be limited." The "ultimate sovereignty of God precluded the idea that any
human authority could be unlimited."

Precisely. And because today the sovereignty of
God is denied, the sovereignty of man and the state is affirmed. It is
useless to rail against the present trend if we are a part of it, and unless
we affirm the sovereignty of God in its every aspect, we are to all
practical intent affirming man and his humanistic order. In other words, you
have already taken sides, and you had better know it. You are either working
for the "Crown Rights of King Jesus" or for the crown claims of humanistic
man. You cannot logically affirm "the rule of law", "moral principles", and
"old-fashioned virtues" without affirming the sovereignty of God. The
Marxists are right in recognizing God as the basic and ultimate enemy.
Unless you stand in terms of the sovereignty of God as your strength, your
first and last line of defense, and the ground of all advance, move over and
join the enemy: you are a humanist.